Moonwalk, Home Run

In the summer of 1983, I was hanging around in Paris, living in a cheap hotel room with no shower or toilet, channelling my meager funds into screenings at the Cinémathèque (which had two theatres then, one at the Palais de Chaillot and the other on the fifth floor of the Pompidou Center), and filling notebooks early mornings in a café at the Place de la Contrescarpe (see “A Moveable Feast”). Having done so for almost three months—and I had an inflexible return ticket for the end of August; the question was whether to use it—I was walking by a bunch of second-hand clothing shops near Les Halles when, from an open storefront, I heard “Billie Jean” and, for the first time, started to miss home. I wondered why. What I intuited then, and understand now, is Jackson’s peculiar convergence of the street with the boardroom, of grassroots styles with ambition, power, and the practical smarts to realize them. I’m no scholar of Jacksoniana, but am struck by the details in Wikipedia’s entry on “Thriller,” which show that his prominence in, and dominance of, pop life were no accident. He knew what he had, he knew what could be done with it—and he made it happen. And from there…refer back to Lord Acton’s dictum on power and absolute power.

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